Slashdot Mirror
100 Million-Core Supercomputers Coming By 2018
CWmike writes "As amazing as today's supercomputing systems are, they remain primitive and current designs soak up too much power, space and money. And as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough — a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system. Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world's fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. But Jaguar's record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The US Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful — an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The latter project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the US is co-developing. They're expected to arrive in 2018 — in line with Moore's Law — which helps to explain the roughly 10-year development period. But the problems involved in reaching exaflop scale go well beyond Moore's Law."
Can't we just start calling this a 'supercore' or something? When the numbers get that high it kind of goes beyond what most people can visualize. Like describing how hot the Sun is....let's just says it's "exactly 1 Sun hot".
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Wait, what? You lost me. Are you from the future? How can you describe the state of the art as "primitive"?
-Peter
The CFL condition that limits the maximum time step one can take shows no sign of relenting. Score has been Courant (the C in CFL) 1, Moore 0 for the last three decades.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
All this effort at creating parallel computing ends up solving very few problems. HPC has been struggling with parallelism for decades, and no easy solutions found yet. Note that these computers are aimed at solving a particular problem (e.g. modeling weather) and not at being a vehicle to quickly solve any problem. When the comparable multi-processing capacity is in your cell phone, what are you going to do with it?
2B|^2B
Technically, shouldn't 640K processors be enough for every one?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We know what answer it is going to give. 42. Save the money.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Only if they run Linux and can render Natalie Portman covered in hot grits faster than my imagination already does....woohoo!
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
The first Jaguar was a single megaflop.
Maybe this thing will have enough power to run Windows by 2018??
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
When the comparable multi-processing capacity is in your cell phone, what are you going to do with it?
Stream high definition porn... duh.
How many cores do we need to simulate a human brain?
I believe AMD was the first mass market CPU to include an on-board memory controller.
I am currently accepting investors to help build a one billion core supercomputer to create high resolution climate models that take into account the waste heat from a 100 million core supercomputer making a high resolution climate model.
(Seriously, how much heat is that thing going to put out?)
Note that these computers are aimed at solving a particular problem (e.g. modeling weather) and not at being a vehicle to quickly solve any problem.
That's not entirely accurate. HPC systems are designed to solve a class of problems. That's not the same thing as a "particular" problem. Jaguar has, in fact, solved many different problems, including fluid flow, weather, nuclear fusion and supernova modeling. It's not going to run Word any faster than your PC but that's not what you buy a supercomputer to do.
What on Earth? You're bringing PHP and "rendering PDF reports" into a discussion about HPC? And you propose Erlang as some kind of solution? Nobody doing HPC is using Erlang. As usual for Slashdot, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
That's not entirely accurate. HPC systems are designed to solve a class of problems. That's not the same thing as a "particular" problem. Jaguar has, in fact, solved many different problems, including fluid flow, weather, nuclear fusion and supernova modeling. It's not going to run Word any faster than your PC but that's not what you buy a supercomputer to do.
So you're saying that OpenOffice would still take forever to start.
Sounds like a pork program. What are "bio energy products", anyway. Ethanol?
I'm no expert on this, but I would guess the idea is to use the processing power to model different kinds of molecular manipulation to see what kind of energy density we can get out of manufactured biological goo. Combustion modeling is a common problem solved by HPC systems. Or maybe we can expore how to use bacteria created to process waste and give off energy as a byproduct. I don't know, the possibilities are endless.
It's striking how few supercomputers are sold to commercial companies. Even the military doesn't use them much any more.
Define "supercomputer." Sony uses them. So does Boeing. The auto industry uses clusters to model crashes, but I believe that's more limited by the design of the off-the-shelf software than anything. They could certainly run on supercomputer-class machines if the vendors ported them.
And the military uses them a lot. Much of the DOE research done on these machines is probably defense-driven.
I'd be guessing but here are three possible reasons AMD might be in that place:
1.) Value, ie. lower cost per processor
2.) Opteron has built in straight forward 4-way and 8-way multiprocessor connectivity, Xeon was limited to 2-way connectivity without extra bridge hardware, until recently.
3.) Opteron has higher memory bandwidth than P4 or Core 2 arch.
Easy CPU upgrades because the socket interface stay the same.
Some of those supoercomputers might have gone from dual-core 2GHz Opteron K8s through quad-core Opteron K10s to these new sexa-core Opteron K10.5s with only the need to change the CPUs and the memory.
Or possibly if the upgrades were done at a board level, HyperTransport has remained compatible, so your new board of 24 cores just slots into your expensive, custom, HyperTransport-based back-end. To switch to Intel would require designing a QPI-based back-end.
Of course Magny-Cours and Bulldozer will use the G34 socket, so that's not a plug-in and go upgrade when they come out in 2010 and 2011 respectively. But it will be a stable platform for several years itself, and thus be attractive.
just had an ugly thought...."Windows17 for PC (Personal Cloud)"
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Stream it? With that much processing power it should be able to create it on the spot: "Computer, let's start today's scenario with Angelina Jolie surrounded by...."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
...what might happen if we could run a copy of The Sims on a truly massive supercomputer. It would need to be somewhat customised for that particular machine/environment, of course, but I think it could be interesting.
There were times when I did see something close to genuinely emergent behaviour in the Sims 2, or more specifically, emergent combinations of pre-existing routines. You need to set things up for them in a way which is somewhat out of the box, and definitely not in line with real world human architectural or aesthetic norms, but it can happen.
Makes me think; if we could run the Sims, or the bots from some currently existing FPS, parallel on a sufficiently large scale, we might eventually start seeing some very interesting results come from it, at least within the contexts of said games.